Thomas Hardy quotes - page 2

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed. (Thomas Hardy)
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!
Thomas Hardy
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so?
Thomas Hardy
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
Thomas Hardy
I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!
Thomas Hardy
All romances end at marriage.
Thomas Hardy
A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.
Thomas Hardy
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
Thomas Hardy
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
Thomas Hardy
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
Thomas Hardy
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. (Thomas Hardy)
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Thomas Hardy
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
Thomas Hardy
I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
Thomas Hardy
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock the holly whistles as it battles with itself the ash hisses amid its quiverings the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.
Thomas Hardy
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
Thomas Hardy
Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds.
Thomas Hardy
It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
Thomas Hardy
Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
Thomas Hardy
A local cult called Christianity.
Thomas Hardy
Done because we are too menny. (Thomas Hardy)
Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...
Thomas Hardy
Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
Thomas Hardy
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
Thomas Hardy
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession . . .
Thomas Hardy